14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists have for a long time considered the Internet to be a place where limitless possibilities can come true. In a recent study, experts from the Stevens Institute of Technology (SIT) decided to take on a unique task – that of building a cyber crowd. The goal of their research, which is supported by the US National Science Foundation (NSF), is to determine whether various design can be accomplished by a set of individuals quickly assembled online, in other words a cyber-crowd.
Their approach to learning more about this phenomenon is called “Crowdsourcing Creativity: Experiments in Design,” and is scheduled to take place over the next three years. The work is conducted by SIT researchers Jeffrey V. Nickerson and Yasuaki Sakamoto, who want to determine precisely how well can groups of people who have never met each other work together in solving common problems. In order to understand the goals of this investigation, you first have to understand how innovation was defined throughout the ages.
At first, it was considered that the ability to innovate came from individuals. Then, as society evolved, this ability was translated to closely-knit groups of people, who knew and worked with each other in solving complex tasks. This is the case now, when various experts come together in start-ups and research facilities around the world. But sociologists want to learn whether innovation is indeed dependent on the way people interact with each other. The SIT crew, for example, wants to demonstrate that they can throw an issue to an instantly-gathered cyber-crowd of 100 people, who will come up with ideas on how to solve it within hours.
These ideas could then be forwarded to another group of individuals, who would refine them further, and so on. “Because of the emergence of crowds of individuals online who will undertake small tasks for fun or money, there is now a crowdsourcing marketplace that is diverse, large and motivated. We think that the crowd can innovate, providing new and specific solutions to broad social problems, such as those related to our need for energy,” explains Nickerson, who is also the director of the SIT Center for Decision Technologies.
“The Internet makes possible a different kind of design which is an extension of collaborative problem solving. Professor Nickerson's and Professor Sakamoto's work will develop a new way of approaching design problems, and this new approach has the potential to accelerate many creative processes,” adds the interim president of SIT, Dr. George P. Korfiatis. “If we truly believe in the crowd, we ought to let it control its evolution,” Nickerson concludes.